Good morning. President Obama Tuesday made cybersecurity part of the national conversation, issuing an executive order in the afternoon and putting it in the spotlight during his State of the Union address, the WSJ reports. Mr. Obama said foreign actors are trying “sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions, our air-traffic control systems,” and said the U.S. has to act “in the face of real threats to our security and our economy.”

CIOs should seize this opportunity to raise awareness of cybersecurity issues within their own organizations, and provide business leaders with meaningful options. Manish Kapoor, CIO of NuStar Energy L.P., which operates pipelines and terminal facilities for the oil and gas industries, says he engages senior executives in a highly structured risk assessment exercise in order to determine their highest levels of concern and prioritize security investments accordingly. “Otherwise you don’t know where to start,” he told CIO Journal.

Whether or not voluntary guidelines accomplish anything, a number of elements of the president’s executive order may alleviate a big problem for companies that are under attack. Government agencies often don’t provide enough information to help those companies defend themselves because a lot of critical information is classified. The order signed Tuesday requires government agencies to “expedite the processing of security clearances” for employees of those companies, and to produce unclassified reports of specific threats in a “timely” manner. Eric Friedberg, co-president of Stroz Friedberg LLC, a digital risk management and investigations firm, told CIO Journal last month, “if you’re Viacom or Sony or JP Morgan Chase, you don’t have classified people in the IT department and there’s nobody [for agencies] to give the information to.”

Top performers talk to their CIOs. Cybersecurity is only one reason for CIOs to engage actively with business leaders. Companies with strong, collaborative relationships between the CIO and other C-suite executives are four times more likely to be top-performing companies than those with fragmented relationships, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP’s fifth annual Digital IQ survey, released Tuesday. “It’s not enough to just have the CIO sitting at the table,” Chris Curran, principal and chief technologist at PwC’s advisory practice. There needs to be an in-depth, ongoing conversation among the CIO and other C-level executives, he told CIO Journal.

Debt collector hangs up on deadbeats. Encore Capital Group CIO Carl Eberling is moving the company away from traditional debt collection methods to a more scientific approach that includes the use of analytics to better understand which debtors are more likely to pay up, and a new self-service website that allows them to set up their own repayment schedules. “I’m keenly interested in how we take some self-service capabilities, give the consumer a new way to interact with us that doesn’t require the phone call and allow them to do it on their own time and their own way,” Mr. Eberling told CIO Journal. Mr. Eberling is also moving as many IT functions as possible to cloud services. But his modernization attempts aren’t without challenges. Intensive use of analytics requires hiring specialized IT talent because, “at the end of the day, it’s not a DBA [database administrator] that is going to be coming up with these what-if analyses and hashing algorithms,” he said. “It’s going to be a scientist.”

TECHNOLOGY NEWS

How Lockheed Martin stopped SecureID attack. Dark Reading’s Kelly Jackson Higgins recounts defense contractor Lockheed Martin Corp.‘s successful efforts repelling a network intruder months after a data breach at RSA exposed its SecurID database. After discovering that someone was using a valid SecurID token to attempt to access data unrelated to the user’s work, Lockheed applied a homegrown framework, called Cyber Kill Chain, to track the intruder’s movements and throw up barriers preventing data from leaving the network. ”We look at what they are trying to do and focus on whatever their objectives are … and cut off their objectives,” Lockheed’s cybersecurity director tells Higgins. “I can still defend the doors, but I’m not going to sit there and put all my efforts there.”

T. Rowe Price speaks out against Dell buyout. Money manager T. Rowe Price Group, a major shareholder of Dell Inc., said it will not support the PC maker’s leveraged buyout offer, reports Reuters. “We believe the proposed buyout does not reflect the value of Dell, and we do not intend to support the offer as put forward,” said T. Rowe’s chief investment officer. Dell founder Michael Dell and Silver Lake Partners are leading efforts to buy the company through a $13.65 share offer. Last Friday, another major shareholder, Southeastern Asset Management, expressed its hostility to the deal.

Apple calls proxy fight a ‘silly sideshow.’Apple Inc. CEO Tim Cook had some choice words for a proxy fight concerning cash distribution instigated by a prominent investor. “I find it bizarre we find ourselves being sued for doing something that’s good for shareholders,” Mr. Cook said at a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. technology conference Tuesday. Hedge fund manager David Einhorn is suing the company over requiring a shareholder vote on a proposed stock amendment that he says could limit how the company returns some of its $137 billion cash pile to investors, report the WSJ’s Jessica E. Lessin and Thomas Gryta. “Apple doesn’t have a depression-era mentality,” Mr. Cook said in response to criticism that Apple is hoarding its money. After taking on Mr. Einhorn, Mr. Cook offered a bullish view of the company, batting aside concerns that Apple’s lower-priced products were cannibalizing Apple’s other devices, and announcing plans to add 30 more Apple stores worldwide. Mr. Cook also told the audience that when he gets depressed he visits an Apple Store, comparing the experience to “taking a Prozac.”

EBay wants to disrupt home delivery.EBay Inc. CEO John Donahoe wants his company to be the “Uber for delivery people.” Uber is the app which links up people looking for a ride with a network of town car owners in search of the next fare. Mr. Donahoe believes that same model can help delivery agents work with retailers to deliver products to a buyer’s doorstep within two hours. “We think we can do it at scale. No one single retailer can do it on their own, so we are building it for the retail industry and using our technology capabilities to build it,” Mr. Donahoe told an audience at AllThingsD’s Dive into Media conference. Currently, eBay is running pilot programs in San Francisco and parts of New York City.

Dropbox targets business with new controls. Popular cloud-file storage company Dropbox Inc. has added some new administrative controls that could attract more business users, and step up competition against Box Inc., a storage and collaboration platform company that has worked to attract business users since its launch. The big enhancement, explains AllThingsD’s Arik Hesseldahl, is the creation of a console giving managers the ability to track users signed in to a company’s Dropbox account, as well as control over what they can and can’t do to documents.

Consumers rank Amazon as top company. Amazon.com Inc. topped a Harris Interactive survey of 14,000 U.S. consumers as the company with the best reputation. The online commerce giant beat out Apple, last year’s top ranked company, as well as Walt Disney Co., Google Inc. and Johnson & Johnson. Consumers were asked to rank each company on a number of factors including products and services, vision and leadership, financial performance and emotional appeal, reports TechCrunch’s Ingrid Lunden. Amazon.com took top honors in products and services and emotional appeal (because who doesn’t like a box from Amazon.com arriving in the mail?)

Intel readying launch of Internet television device. Intel Corp. is working on a device, scheduled to launch later this year, that will offer television over the Internet, reports the Verge’s Dieter Bohn. “We will have live television, catch-up television, on-demand [and] a set of applications,” says Erik Huggers, general manager of Intel Media. Intel is currently working with the industry to make deals to provide content—a task far more complex than actually making the device. Mr. Huggers would not share the name of the service and did not take price, only saying that the new service is “not about a value play.”

It’s not you, it’s Facebook.WSJ reporter Julia Angwin is unfriending you—and everyone else—on Facebook Inc. As the reporter behind the award-winning “What They Know” series explains on her private blog, she doubts the social network’s ability to keep private things private. “My specific concern with Facebook is what NYU Professor Helen Nissenbaum calls a lack of ‘contextual integrity‘ – which is a fancy way of saying that when I share information with a certain group or friend on Facebook, I am often surprised by where the data ends up,” she writes. Besides finding herself signed up for various Facebook groups without her knowledge, Ms. Angwin finds the “mutual friend” functionality, where two parties on Facebook are notified of shared acquaintances, particularly troubling if she happens to be friends with some of her sources. “And so I’ve decided to unfriend everyone and keep a bare-bones profile for the simple purposes of messaging, untagging and being found by people who might want to find me,” she concludes.

Network for neighborhoods attracts financial backing.Nextdoor, a website for connecting neighbors, is getting venture capital support from Greylock Partners, which earlier invested in LinkedIn Corp. and Facebook, reports the NYT’s Nick Wingfield. Greylock has led a $21.6 million financing round in Nextdoor and David Sze, the Greylock partner who invested in LinkedIn and Facebook, will join Nextdoor’s board of directors. New investors participating in the funding also include Google Ventures and Bezos Expeditions, the investment firm of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon.com chief executive, along with existing investors Benchmark Capital and Shasta Ventures. In total, the company has raised $40.2 million.

EVERYTHING ELSE YOU NEED TO KNOW

The president didn’t just talk about cybersecurity. One of the most specific proposals in the speech was a push to raise the minimum wage. The WSJ points out that as a presidential candidate in 2008, Mr. Obama proposed increasing the federal minimum wage to $9.50 an hour, but it’s been sitting on the back burner – until last night. “Tonight, let’s declare that in the wealthiest nation on Earth, no one who works full-time should have to live in poverty, and raise the federal minimum wage to $9 an hour,” he said. The White House doesn’t think the move would hit businesses too hard or raise the unemployment rate – citing research showing “no detectable employment losses from the kind of minimum wage increases we have seen in the United States,” the NYT reports. And the administration points to companies like Costco and Stride Rite, which have both supported increasing the minimum wage in the past as a way to reduce employee turnover and improve productivity. But, as the Times points out, any push to hike the minimum wage will face strong opposition in the business community.

Comcast makes big bet on NBC.Comcast is buying out GE‘s 49% stake in NBCUniversal for $16.7 billion, taking full control of the TV and movie company sooner than expected, the WSJ reports. Comcast had the right to buy out GE’s remaining stake starting in July 2014 and extending several years past that date, while GE similarly had the right to sell its stake. “Our belief is that we would have paid more later,” said Comcast Chief Executive Brian Roberts. The move is a big bet on an industry facing an uncertain future with the rise of Netflix and Amazon.com. And it shows that the company thinks it can benefit from owning both distribution and content — a strategy tried and abandoned by other media companies like Time Warner. GE is now flush with cash, the Journal notes, and the company said it would spend much of the money buying back shares. GE now plans to buy back $35 billion of its stock through 2015.

Avon brings cash home, but takes a tax hit.Avon is considering repatriating some of its overseas cash to cover funding needs at home, the WSJ reports. Avon holds $1.1 billion in cash abroad and executives decided they might need to bring some back after the company tried to renegotiate the terms of some debt. The negotiations took longer than expected and weren’t “constructive,” Avon CFO Kimberly Ross said on a conference call. Avon decided to redeem the debt ahead of schedule using overseas cash. The move will cost the company—not just in terms of taxes, but also because the notes’ terms require it to pay a premium of $65 million above the $535 million face value. The company booked a $168 million tax provision in its fourth quarter related to the move.

The factors that render the electrical grid vulnerable to cyber attack are strikingly similar to the cyber risk issues faced by health care, financial services, and other industries. But one recent malware campaign targeting utilities shows just how exposed the grid remains to cyber threats.